Drawing on research with two cohorts of student co-researchers who studied capstones, this chapter offers a model to explore the complementary frameworks of students-as-partners and community-engaged scholarship. The authors explore how the principles of each framework might fulfill higher education’s tripartite missions of teaching, research, and service, and encourage full, democratic participation and civic involvement. Engaging with students-as-partners is a practice gaining momentum internationally (Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). In these partnerships, students and university staff collaborate and contribute to pedagogical and research projects in equal, but different ways (Cook-Sather et al., 2014) to facilitate more equitable, diverse, and inclusive educational opportunities (Rankin et al., 2020). As part of a larger research project on student diversity, identity, and capstone experiences, the authors engaged with students-as-partners in a research collaboration. While the inclusion of student co-researchers was not an initial part of the research project, it became evident as research progressed that a students-as-partners approach would allow the team to more thoroughly address the research questions.